Now This

At about the age of 11 or 12 I began to voraciously read science fiction.

Many stories dealt with time. I exercised my imagination with concepts like “the space-time continuum,” “time warps,” and “time travel.” Mostly the stories imagined a human ability to manipulate time.

I didn’t understand time very well, but it seemed mysterious and very important, so I asked my uncle Bert, the smartest person I knew, to define it for me.

“Sequence,” he answered in a word.

It seemed too easy. Of course everything was not simultaneous. But to just say “sequential” still doesn’t say what time is.

Some of my favorite poets write about it.

Gary Snyder said: “As the crickets soft hum is to us, so are we to the trees, as are they, to the rocks and the hills.”

That puts me into what geologists call deep time, the scale of time in which mountains appear to walk and stone women to dance. In that scale of time we humans have proliferated and impacted the planet almost as suddenly and as meteors have done.

A line from Allen Ginsburg’s Howl has stayed with me for years:

“. . . who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for eternity outside of time, and alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade.”

Sonia Johnson, the ex-mormon feminist, wrote about the “time is money” paradigm, which makes time a commodity controlled largely by the capitalist class through the wage system, in effect, colonizing a large part of our lives. Alarm clocks remind us of that again every day.

Alarm clocks are also deeply associated with zen practices involving a schedule. I think I really learned to use one in my 20’s, getting up for early morning zazen before work.

Still, we knew that eternity was just now. A song about it was passed around: “We’re on an endless journey through eternity. Peace, be still! There is nowhere to run.”

To say “sequential” does not address eternity.

We could say “causation” and immediately, if momentarily, see that this, our one and only moment, now, is truly a world of the consequences of everything previous and the seeds of everything to come.

Everything indeed connects to everything else

You might say this is our version of “The Secret.”

This awakeness!

Now is the time!